Alejandro Ribadeneira

About five years ago my family thought that it would be brilliant to give my seventy-something year old grandfather an electric cigarette. This old man who smoked tobacco since he was a teenager, and loved it, did not say thank you for the gift. Instead, he said—“this is like having sex with a sex doll, I do not want it.” …

I relate to Pico Iyer’s talk Where Is Home? in various levels, but mostly in his realization that you do not need much to feel at home. In fact, that you simply need to feel somewhat comfortable with who you are. I am a very slow worker. I believe that it takes me 99% thinking and 1% making in most …

My mom is a half French, half Ecuadorian chef who studied psychology. As far as I know, she loves many more things than the ones she is a cynic about—contrary to her skeptic French mother. Although, I believe we pick our battles, and she chose to hate mason jars out of context. Being a cook, she often ends up in …

I spent three years moving around the world with about 35 other students, 12 teachers, and some residence life advisors. Settings changed very often—every three to six months we would be in a different city, trying to call it home. However, people did not change. A funny thing occurs with this phenomenon, the common links we make regarding certain people and …

A recent interest of mine is that of urban gawking. More romantically, I like to call myself an architectural flaneur with a love for iPhoneography. This interest was manifested when New York City started to speak to me, in unexpected spaces and moments. My eye for objects turned into an eye for seeing objects anthropomorphize and, effectually, be part of …

Growing up in the global south (with innumerable inputs from North America in the media) can be seen as a series of disappointing circumstances. Firstly, Christmas as a phenomenon cause severe cognitive dissonance. All of those Christmas trees, snowmen and women, woolen hats and sweaters, they simply did not fit in Ecuador—but they were the image that the TV portrayed of …

I spent most of my childhood in two houses. The first one that I can remember was a rather large house with pitched roofs, wooden beams, and an expansive garden — twenty minutes away from the equatorial line, in suburban Quito, Ecuador. It would take about an hour to get to school, which was in another suburb in the other …

Le Corbusier’s proposals on how design should instruct dwellers and compose cities for his imagined city of the future appeal to me — in terms of urban planning — as attractive paper design and insipid physical work. This is not to say that I do not admire his work seen individually, in a close picture. Le Corbusier’s house and mixed-use …

When I lived in Auckland, New Zealand, I spent a lot of time alone. We lived on Parnell Road, in the heart of the posh neighborhood of Parnell in central Auckland. The commute to school was of about 20 minutes on a bus — a time I often spent thinking about where will I run away to from school during …

I think that with time my memory has shifted from being chronological to being purely geographic. I believe this became a collective reality at THINK Global School, the school where I spent my three last years of high school. We would often say things like, “do you remember that bike trip in Japan?” or “I really hated our food in …

Everyone in my mother’s family would agree that my grandfather’s apartment held an interesting aura. Many would argue it did not have a wonderful one, and I agree. In recent years the place was inhabited by my eclectic grandfather, his assistant, and the occasional cleaner. However, many more people lived there with him in the past, and left remnants as …

It is always a bit uncomfortable to first sit down in an airplane — I possibly just made the old woman on the window seat move because she sat on my place, my belt is pushing into my stomach, I already have to pee. Regardless, I place my backpack under the front seat, take off my shoes, and gently slide …